Modular structure of web-based decision support systems for integrated pest management. A review

Sustainable pest management implies less pesticide use and replacement by safe control alternatives. This requires decision support for rational pest management. However, in practice, successful decision making is dependent upon the availability of integrated, high-quality information. Computer-aided forecasting and related decision support systems make pest control more sustainable by avoiding unwanted consequences of pesticide applications. Here, I review integrated pest management for web-based decision support systems. The major points are the following: (1) Principles of integrated pest management are compatible with sustainable agriculture. (2) Pest models serve as basis of decision making because they offer means to predict the exact time of pest phenological development and initiate management actions. Most models are climate driven. (3) New hardware technology has permitted the registration of automatically recorded climatic data. This data can be combined with pest models through logical operations and forecasting algorithms to develop a software of pest management. (4) Dynamic web interfaces can serve as decision support systems providing the user with real-time pest warnings and recommendations for management actions. (5) Ontology web programing and semantic knowledge representations provide a way to classify and describe agrodata to facilitate information sharing and data exploitation over distributed systems. (6) Most available pest management data is published on static web pages and, thus, cannot be classified as decision support systems. Some web-based decision support systems provide user-interactive content and real-time pest forecasts and management support.